So, my friend Ivey lives in Salt Lake, and she's an actress. Today, she's coming down to Provo to audition for something at the LDS Film Studio, which is like 5 minutes from my apartment. Because of my proximity to said studio, she asked if I could watch her daughter for like 20 minutes while she auditions.
To be on time, she asked me to meet her outside the studio at quarter 'til two. HOWEVER [here's the glitch in the story], last time I'd checked with her, I could have sworn we'd agreed on quarter 'til ONE. Anyway, so Nadin and I get there at 12:50 and start looking around the lot. At about 12:55, this car drives past us being driven by a friendly blond woman who waves at us...but with no child in the car to be seen.
Me: Hey, that's her! But, where's her daughter?
So, we mosy on over to the car and wait for her to get out to question the whereabouts of her daughter...only to discover [to my utter horror] that this woman WASN'T Ivey! This is where things got super awkward...
Me: Oh!...hi! How's it going?
Lady: I'm great, how are you doing? [She was sporting a HUGE smile, by the way]
Me: I'm...alright...[at this point, I'm too mortified to even explain the mix-up]
Lady: Awesome...well, I'll see ya...
As she walked off, I whispered to Nadin, "That lady...wasn't my friend..."
She now thinks I'm an idiot and that I need to apologize to that poor smiling woman.
TO FINISH THE STORY--
I talked to Ivey and finally figured out when she was going to meet us. So, after much confusion on our end, we meet up with her and Annie before she went in to assess the situation [since quite a few people showed up to this audition]. Here's where the fun begins...
As soon as we'd been given instructions about fruit snacks, Annie realized that Mom was walking away from her, which [naturally] brought on the screams and tears that made me sound like I was beating the child with the body of a dead bison. 10 minutes, a couple of strolls around the area, and one fruit snack later, Nadin and I were reading her a story as she calmly pointed to and identified different animals in the book.
Then, Ivey comes back outside sheepishly to tell us that they wouldn't be able to see her audition for another 30 minutes. Because we're nice and have no lives, we agreed to stick around to play with her kid until she could get this over with. During the waiting, we played on this epically HUGE seesaw with Annie, which she enjoyed immensely. When Ivey went back inside, we started collecting pine cones "for the squirrels to eat" and putting them in a large pile. But, inevitably, tragedy and more bloody-murder screams followed us as Annie tripped and fell, landing on a weed of sorts and getting thorns stuck in both her hands.
Realizing that I was an idiot for not blocking her fall with my face or something equally less important than her happiness, we whisked her back over to a bench and removed the thorns while pouring water on her hands to evade infection [at least I was thinking clearly enough to not allow her hands to fall off]. She finally calmed down again after my Mexican genius started making "ribbit" noises and telling Annie that she had a frog in her stomach.
BUT--IVEY CAME BACK AGAIN [I couldn't believe how inefficiently this place was run!]. Apparently, she was going to be seen in another 10 minutes, so we strolled through some of the woods nearby and looked at leaves and such. I was amazed that there were trees in Provo!
So, she goes back in [for real this time], and Annie decided that she'd rather play with her Mom than us. Needing to prevent a third onslaught of tears, I took sudden and intense interest in a bush full of pretty "pink" leaves she liked while we were investigating the woods. This lead to picking some uniquely shaped leaves from another bush and pretending they were butterflies. The dynamic of our butterfly friendship was pretty unhealthy: my butterfly would come over to play, then hers would take a nap, and mine would have to go home and take a nap of its own until hers felt like waking up to see mine. Every time I went to see if her butterfly had woken up, she would shriek and I'd have to feign terror to make her laugh. She thinks I have a funny face.
Finally, finally, finally, Ivey finished with her audition and we parted ways. Even if things got a little teary, it was a fun afternoon, since I'm such a big stinkin' fan of the Mitchell family. I hope that this satisified everyone's curiousity about my afternoon with a child.
